Agility Names Nyobolt as Digit 5's Charging Supplier, and the 20-Hour Day Rests on a 9-Minute Charge

Agility Robotics said on Oct. 15 that Nyobolt, a Cambridge, U.K., battery company, supplies the fast-charging system for its Digit 5 humanoid, which Agility says will deliver more than 20 productive hours in a 24-hour day. Early-access Digit 5 units with Nyobolt's technology are scheduled for the first half of 2027, The Robot Report reported.

The figures behind the claim are a 90-minute runtime and a nine-minute charge. Agility has not disclosed the battery's capacity in kilowatt-hours, so the charging power cannot be calculated from what it has published.

What a 90-minute run and a nine-minute charge produce

Daniel Diez, Agility's chief business officer, said in the announcement: "For our customers, Digit's uptime is the business case." A cycle of 90 minutes working and nine minutes charging lasts 99 minutes, which fits 14.5 times into a day. That yields about 21.8 hours of runtime and 2.2 hours of charging, the split Silicon Canals arrives at as well.

That is a ceiling. It assumes the robot is never waiting for a dock, never faulted, never handing a tote to a person and never in maintenance. Silicon Canals notes that Agility has not published an independent customer-floor test of a Digit 5 workday. Its field data is for the previous model: at a GXO facility Digit 4 reportedly reached 98 percent tote-sorting accuracy over more than 100,000 units, which measures accuracy and not hours worked.

Digit 4 ran at a 2:1 run-to-charge ratio, per The Robot Report. Applied to a 24-hour day, that is 16 hours of runtime. Digit 5's 10:1 ratio lifts the ceiling by about 5.8 hours of runtime a day at the same robot count.

Model	Run : charge	Runtime per 24 h, ceiling
Digit 4	2:1	16.0 hours
Digit 5	10:1	21.8 hours

What the price turns the hours into

The pricing comes from Agility's merger filing, as The Robot Report reported on Sept. 7. Robots-as-a-service costs about $8,500 a month plus a $25,000 deployment fee; direct purchase costs about $200,000 upfront, a $20,000 deployment fee and about $36,000 a year for software and maintenance. Agility cautions that the unit economics depend on many assumptions.

On a 30-day month, 20 productive hours a day is 600 hours, which puts the $8,500 service fee at about $14.17 an hour before the deployment fee. At 16 hours a day it is 480 hours, or $17.71. The difference is the argument for Nyobolt: at a fixed monthly price, each added hour of work lowers the price of every hour by about 20 percent. That arithmetic is ours, and it treats every runtime hour as productive.

1. 16 hours a day (2:1 ratio)17.71 dollars per hour
2. 20 hours a day (Agility's claim)14.17 dollars per hour

Source: The Robot Report, Sept. 7, 2026 ($8,500 monthly fee); hours are our arithmetic on Agility's 2:1 and 20-hour figures

The company behind the pack

Nyobolt was founded in 2019 and raised $60 million in May 2026 at a $1 billion valuation, with support from Symbotic, according to The Robot Report. Sai Shivareddy, Nyobolt's co-founder and chief executive, said the technology was chosen because "Digit 5 will need more power from a smaller, lighter pack." Nyobolt's fast-charging performance is the company's own claim, and no independent test of it has been published.

The Robot Report also reported the commercial backdrop: 2025 net sales of $1.8 million, a 2025 operating loss of $140 million, and an implied $2.5 billion valuation in its merger with Churchill Capital Corp. XI, roughly 1,400 times 2025 revenue. Agility has more than $300 million in multi-year Digit 5 orders from one customer and projects about 800 units in 2027.

How Digit 5 compares on the other specs

Digit 5 stands 5 feet 11 inches, weighs 284 pounds, lifts 50 pounds repeatedly and reaches 7.2 feet, against 5.5 feet for Digit 4, per The Robot Report. Silicon Canals, citing Forbes, puts Boston Dynamics' Atlas at a 66-pound payload, a 7.5-foot reach and about four hours of runtime with a hot-swappable battery. Boston Dynamics' own blog puts the Atlas robot's payload above 100 pounds, so the Forbes figure may be dated. Either way Atlas leads on payload; Digit 5's claimed edge is recharge speed. Atlas, pictured above, is a different robot with a different battery strategy: swap the pack and keep working, where Digit docks and waits nine minutes.

The timing has moved. An eWeek article dated Aug. 12 said early Digit 5 units were scheduled to reach customers in December 2026; Agility's own statements since then say first-half 2027 for early access, and general availability for manufacturing, warehouse and distribution operators by the end of 2027.

For other physical-A.I. companies and their deployment counts, see our reports on Origin's 150-robot target and Mind Robotics.

What would change my read

Two disclosures would settle it: the pack's capacity in kilowatt-hours, and the share of a customer shift that Digit 5 spends docked. If the dock is a single shared charger and robots queue for it, the 21.8 hours falls fast. The first early-access units are due in the first half of 2027, and Agility's Oct. 20 and 21 appearances at RoboBusiness in Santa Clara are the next place it may answer.